Musings

In an influential 1979 behavioral economics paper, Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky developed “Prospect Theory” as a way to make sense of decision-making. The summary of the paper was, if I may, that humans do not make optimal decisions, which normative (”should”) frameworks suggest, but instead have irrational aversion to certain losses, and minimize the probability of other losses. Here’s an example:  Here, Kahneman (via Thinking, Fast and Slow) outlines the cases where a […]

Two anecdotes stuck out to me in Derek Thompson’s Atlantic post about “The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything.” First, the concept that people prefer the image of themselves in the mirror to that in photos. I certainly do, and often feel like I look lopsided in photos. But that makes sense, since I’m seeing the mirror image of what I’m used to seeing. I imagine the same applies to the phenomenon of hearing […]

Over the holiday I was catching up on the unread articles in my browser (time to switch to Pocket/Instapaper… there were almost 100) and I bumped into this one by Bloomberg collecting venture predictions for the most important trend of 2016. I really liked Rebecca’s comment: “2016 was the year the internet quietly sped up″ and haven’t been able to get it out of my head. In the venture community, we often credit Amazon Web Services – […]

The rise of populism, right-wing candidates, and unpredictable jingoism has been correlated in the past with financial crises (quite closely, in fact). My friend Cathy did a great job of exposing this correlation, and noting that perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised about what’s happening in Austria, in Britain, in Italy, France, Germany, and of course the United States. But the surprise, for me, lies elsewhere. A broad swath of U.S. economists would have claimed, as […]

Well, here we are. President-Elect Trump. This past week, I met with a few executives from a portfolio company to discuss the implications of a Trump Administration on the company. The conversation really struck me, particularly a few pieces: At a personal level, they felt compelled to protest and organize, to take a stand against hate and separation. They felt guilty that it seemed like a mutually exclusive choice between being effective business leaders while […]

As recently as last year, smartphone sales globally grew 14%, and while that growth has slowed this year, it is a growth rate on over a billion devices, meaning over 100 million new devices hitting the market per year. That is an extraordinary shift, invites a new paradigm for connecting our world that we are still just beginning to understand. If putting a personal computer in every home enabled the creation of the Internet economy […]

I was having a discussion with my wife this week about this topic – she is in medical training right now, so when she comes from the hospital the topics are always interesting. If you consider someone as a patient, there is a sacred, Hippocratic, oath that defines the relationship. The white coat represents more than a simple transaction, but a level of trust, honor, and responsibility that we have built into our society. As […]

The 19th Century was notable for being the last century of chattel slavery, and the transatlantic slave trade sailed its final voyages over these years. Chattel slavery is a unique and important moment in history. It is unlike any other slavery, in that you were owned *forever.* You couldn’t earn your way out of it. If you escaped, you were in fact in violation of the law, and your children, and their children, and their children […]

I’ve been reading Freaks of Fortune, a wonderful book on the history of the modern insurance industry. It’s a fascinating survey of the emerging capitalist threads of the 19th Century and their implications for the world in which we live. There are too many points to summarize or opine on for one short blog post, but a few concepts jumped out at me (quoted as screenshots below). I’ll split them up into a few posts, so […]

At 9.5 million people, the country’s population is somewhere between Michigan and New Jersey. It’s slightly bigger than New York City. It’s GDP per capita is high, but not in the top 10 (depending on whether you’re using purchasing power parity or nominal GDP), and lower than the United States’. And yet, if you look at the last 10 years of technology activity coming out of that country, they have a *stunning* number of companies […]